Victims of the pathetic losers who think it's cool and funny to post private porn pictures and videos of former flames in the Internet now have an ally in Google.

The search giant on Friday announced a new policy regarding "revenge porn." In a blog post, Google Search senior vice president Amit Singhal wrote:

We’ve heard many troubling stories of “revenge porn”: an ex-partner seeking to publicly humiliate a person by posting private images of them, or hackers stealing and distributing images from victims’ accounts. Some images even end up on “sextortion” sites that force people to pay to have their images removed. ...

Revenge porn images are intensely personal and emotionally damaging, and serve only to degrade the victims—predominantly women. So going forward, we’ll honor requests from people to remove nude or sexually explicit images shared without their consent from Google Search results. This is a narrow and limited policy, similar to how we treat removal requests for other highly sensitive personal information, such as bank account numbers and signatures, that may surface in our search results.

In the coming weeks we’ll put up a web form people can use to submit these requests to us, and we’ll update this blog post with the link.

We know this won’t solve the problem of revenge porn—we aren’t able, of course, to remove these images from the websites themselves—but we hope that honoring people’s requests to remove such imagery from our search results can help.

Singhal certainly is correct that Google's new policy can't eliminate revenge porn, but it at least will make it easier to have specific images removed from search results, which is how most Internet users find things. And that should make some difference.

Maybe Google could go a step further and create landing pages identifying the cowardly creeps who hide behind their anonymity while trying to humiliate online people they used to care about. There's got to be an algorithm for that.

This story, "Golden era may be over for 'revenge porn' creeps " was originally published by
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